Leland Ryken.  Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Wheaton IL: Crossway, 2013. Print.

Years ago the magazine Christianity Today had a tongue-in-cheek magazine quiz to test its readers’ commitment to Christianity. One of the questions that supposedly tested such a commitment was to recall from memory the zip code for Wheaton, Illinois. This book is one in a series called Christian Guides to the Classics from zip code 60187.

Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is a kind of thematic Cliff’s Notes on The Scarlet Letter. It contains 73 pages of plot summary, characterization, and marginal notes. The marginal notes are quick assertions or observations on the action or characters. These notes really make this literary guide stand out.

Hawthorne and Melville are often labeled as the anti-Transcendentalist writers. Ryken’s thesis suggests that Hawthorne is not just anti-Transcendentalist but anti-Romantic. The first half of the novel, he maintains, focuses on Hester Prynne. She comes across as a romantic heroine, guided by her heart. But nothing really changes for her, and she appears powerless to do anything about the problems the other three main characters have.

The second half of the novel, Ryken asserts, reveals that Arthur Dimmesdale is the main character. His problems and his final solution for them show the limits or even the impossibility of a romantic way to deal with sin. (Lead Transcendentalist Emerson’s way of handling it was to say that sin did not exist, that there was no such thing as evil. Yeah, right.)

One could argue that Dimmesdale’s death at the end of the tale is romantic—something straight out of Romeo and Juliet. Still Ryken’s point is worth considering. It certainly flies in the face of today’s Postmodern culture. Postmodernism is a newer, more extreme form of Romanticism, and that is the lens through which many teachers and critics view literature today. Anything to rattle such relativist prejudices cannot be all bad.